In between killing, his other skill was recruiting more sayanim. He had a routine that played upon the Jewish love for their homeland.
“I would tell them that for two thousand years our people dreamed. That for two thousand years we Jews had prayed for deliverance. In song, in prose, in their hearts, we had kept alive the dream—and the dream kept us alive. Now it had happened. Then I add: to make sure it continues we need people like you.”
In cafés along the Paris boulevards, in restaurants on the banks of the Rhine, in Madrid, Brussels, and London’s Golders Green he would repeat the poignant words. More often than not, his vision of what it meant to be a Jew today would gain another sayan. To those who hesitated, he deftly mixed the personal and the political, retelling stories of his time in the Haganah with affectionate stories about Ben-Gurion and other leaders. The last resistance would melt away.
Soon he had over a hundred men and women across Europe to do his bidding: lawyers, dentists, schoolteachers, doctors, tailors, shopkeepers, housewives, secretaries. One group he particularly cherished: German Jews who had returned to the land of their Holocaust; Rafi Eitan called them his “survivor spies.”
Toiling at the coal-face of Mossad operations, Rafi Eitan was careful to distance himself from the politicking that continued to bedevil the Israeli intelligence community. He knew what was going on, of course, the maneuvering by Aman, military intelligence, and Shin Bet to whittle away some of Mossad’s supreme authority. He had heard about the cabals that formed and re-formed, and the “eyes only” reports they sent to the prime minister’s office. But under Meir Amit, Mossad had remained rock steady, brushing aside any attempts to undo its prime position.
Then, one day Meir Amit was no longer in command; his brisk stride down the corridors was gone, along with his piercing gaze and the smile that never seemed to reach his lips. Following his departure, colleagues had urged Rafi Eitan to allow them to lobby for him to become Amit’s replacement, pointing out that he had the qualifications and commanded loyalty and popularity within Mossad. But before Rafi Eitan could decide, the post went to a Labor Party nominee, the colorless and pedantic Zvi Zamir. Rafi Eitan resigned. He had no quarrel with the new Mossad chief; he simply felt that Mossad would no longer be a place where he would feel “comfortable.” Under Meir Amit his brief had been to roam virtually unfettered; he felt that Zamir would do “things only by the book. That was not for me.”
Rafi Eitan set himself up as a private consultant, offering his skills to companies who had to beef up their security or to a wealthy individual who needed to have his staff trained on how to protect him against a terrorist attack. But the work soon paled. After a year Rafi Eitan let it be known he was ready to step back into the fast lane of intelligence work.
When Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister in 1974, he appointed the aggressive, hands-on Yitzhak Hofi to run Mossad and made him answerable to the hawkish Ariel Sharon, who was Rabin’s adviser on security affairs. Sharon promptly made Rafi Eitan his personal assistant. Hofi found himself working closely with a man who shared his own cutthroat attitude toward intelligence operations.
Three years later, in another reshuffle of government, a new prime minister, Menachem Begin, named Rafi Eitan as his personal adviser on terrorism. Eitan’s first act was to organize the assassination of the Palestinian responsible for planning the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of eleven Israeli athletes. Their actual killers were already dead, each one executed by Mossad.
The first to die had been standing in the lobby of his Rome apartment building when he was shot eleven times at close range—a bullet for each murdered athlete. When the next terrorist to die answered a telephone call in his Paris apartment, his head was blown off by a small bomb planted in the receiver and triggered by remote control. Another terrorist was asleep in a hotel room in Nicosia when it was wrecked by a similar bomb. To create panic among the remaining members of the Black September group who had killed the athletes, Mossad Arab sayanim arranged for their obituaries to appear in local Arab newspapers. Their families received flowers and condolence cards shortly
Rafi Eitan set about finding and killing their leader, Ali Hassan Salameh, known throughout the Arab world as the “Red Prince.” Since Munich he had flitted from one Arab capital to another, advising terror groups on strategy. Time and again when Rafi Eitan had been set to strike, the Red Prince had moved on. But finally he had settled among the bomb makers of Beirut. Rafi Eitan knew the city well. Nevertheless, he decided to refresh his memory. Posing as a Greek businessman he traveled there. In the next few days he had discovered Salameh’s precise whereabouts and movements.
